Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Our last question comes from VladSander, who asks Hello Gary, Greetings from Binghamton, home of the Twilight Zone. My question is thus: How much knowledge do you think was lost during the burning of the Library at Alexandria?

The short answer is that it was a significant loss, but the popular version is exaggerated.

The common story is that humanity lost an enormous chunk of its ancient knowledge in a single fire.

That’s not how it worked. There was no single “apocalypse” event that wiped everything out at once. Ancient texts were copied and circulated across the Mediterranean, and copies existed in Other libraries, such as those in Pergamon and Rome.

Undoubtedly, some texts that didn’t exist anywhere else were probably lost, but not nearly as many as most people think. The policy in Alexandria was that any text brought into the city was confiscated for copying. The unique texts were probably those created by scholars in Alexandria.

The amount of surviving ancient texts is probably 1% or less. This is not due to the fire in Alexandria, but rather because papyrus or parchment doesn’t age well because it is organic.

I touched upon this in my episode on the Herculeum scrolls. There are texts we know of because they were referenced in surviving works, but we have no copies of them.

All of the texts we have from ancient Rome, for example, can fit on a single bookcase. Everything else created over the course of centuries has been lost.